Home on Matthew Campbell — Hyperworks

Taking apart the G'AIM'E light gun — both halves of it

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A ¥13,200 Time Crisis console turned out to ship a hardcoded AES key, no secure boot of any kind, and a licensed Namco arcade emulator. The gun turned out to be a second Linux computer with a deliberately unmarked SoC, an NPU, and a root shell on an unpopulated header.

Akihabara cart reader → macOS + Android: dump SNES ROMs without swapping the SD card

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a cartridge reader in Akihabara so I could dump and play SNES games from physical carts. The hardware is excellent — the open-source OSCR / Open Source Cartridge Reader community project — but the stock workflow is:

Dump ROM to the reader’s SD card
Pull the SD card
Copy files on a computer
Launch an emulator

No native UI for macOS or Android. So I fixed that.

Hello hyperworks.nu

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

kanwisher.com is becoming hyperworks.nu.

Same person (@kanwisher / Matthew Campbell). New focus:

Blog — long-form technical posts, including reverse engineering hardware projects and write-ups that feed a future YouTube channel
Talks — conference archive, videos, and booking
Work — TensorFleet and earlier chapters

Stack

Simple on purpose:

How to fail at retirement

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Toastmasters Thailand · ice breaker

Personal ice-breaker talk — the “how to fail at retirement” framing and working-with-kids/tech anecdotes from the notes deck.

Will the Machines take over?

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Toastmasters Bangkok · 2023

Public speaking set on AI and jobs: what computers and programmers are, demos with DALL·E / ChatGPT-era tools, and a call to action rather than doom.

WebAssembly is the future of .NET — Avalonia

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Bangkok meetup · 2022

.NET 6 + WebAssembly + Avalonia for real cross-platform apps (desktop, mobile path, WASM).

Deck themes

WASM use cases: desktop ports, games, shared backend code, less JS
.NET 6: AOT, trimming, single-file
Blazor vs full UI frameworks; Avalonia vs MAUI readiness
Happen Space product context
Practical pain: shaders, threading, missing libraries, hiring

Takeaway: Avalonia + .NET WASM was production-usable while MAUI still felt early.

How I got crabs with Python

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bangkok meetup · ~2020

Soft-shell crab farming × computer vision: edge ML on Jetson Nano, Fast.AI / PyTorch, YOLO, GStreamer pipelines, and why labeling is the real nightmare.

Takeaways from the deck

Automating physical infrastructure in Thailand
ML is mature enough for production edge boxes
Python is fine for serious IoT/CV work
OctoVision project context

Interview: Loom Network CEO

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Chorus One interview · 2019

Conversation with Brendan Dillon about Loom Network’s approach to scalable DApps, sidechains, and the ecosystem at the time.

Practical Plasma: Gaming

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Upbit Developers Conference 2018 · Korea

Same Practical Plasma: Gaming material as Devcon 4 for a Korea developer audience — Plasma Cash, Loom SDK, and blockchain game architecture.

Same deck as Practical Plasma: Gaming — Devcon 4 (video there).

Practical Plasma: Gaming

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Ethereum Devcon 4 · Prague

Practical Plasma for gaming: real asset ownership, forkability, open data, and scaling NFT-heavy games beyond L1 limits.

From the deck

Why games need more than ERC-721 on mainnet
Plasma variants (Cash, Debit, MVP) — Cash as the practical path
Loom SDK placement in the stack
Sparse Merkle trees, liquidity providers
CryptoZombies as onboarding; hiring/community at the time

Also: archive.devcon.org.

Blockchain Apps in Go

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon UK 2018 · London

Blockchains as specialized databases, smart contracts, and Go’s role (Ethereum clients, Loom, consensus libraries).

Topics

Use cases: money, ledgers, game assets, tokenized equity
Smart contracts: deterministic, events, no external state
Why pure Go apps struggle with determinism (map order, time, goroutines)
Solidity / EVM vs Go infrastructure
Consensus (Raft vs BFT), Merkle trees, storage layers
Loom SDK / sidechains for scalable apps (esp. games)

Build your own distributed database

Sat, 05 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon Singapore 2018

A from-scratch mental model for distributed databases in Go.

Deck outline

Layers: file → KV → SQLite → relational
When MySQL/Postgres are not enough (custom indexes, domain query languages)
Use cases: blockchains, trading, logs, metrics
Go examples: Influx, Prometheus, Vulcan, Ethereum, etcd, Consul
Architecture: consensus (Raft/Paxos/BFT), storage (LevelDB/Rocks/Bolt), query layer
Starting points: HashiCorp Raft, etcd Raft, toy SQL parsers

For people who want to build storage systems, not only use them.

Sponsor lightning talk: Loom Network

Sat, 05 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon Singapore 2018 (sponsor lightning)

Short Loom Network pitch for Go developers: sidechains / DApp tooling and how Loom fit the 2018 blockchain stack.

Intro to Blockchain Development

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Bangkok Python Meetup

Hands-on intro for Python developers: blockchain basics, smart contracts, Solidity/EVM, TestRPC, a voting-app walkthrough, and common pitfalls — then where Python fits in the toolchain.

Intro to Microservices

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

GopherDay / GopherCon Taipei 2017

Intro to microservices with Go bias and DigitalOcean stories.

From speaker notes

Microservice vs monolith — organizational scaling (DO: one Perl app → ~40 services / 300 engineers)
RPC vs message-driven (Kafka) architectures
gRPC + protobuf contracts vs ad-hoc JSON
Config via environment variables
Metrics, structured logging (REK-style stacks)
Container deploys: Docker → Kubernetes / GKE

Example framing: tracking-pixel style services as teaching examples.

Distributed Scheduler Hell

Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon Singapore 2017

Go-flavored edition of Distributed Scheduler Hell: why Go fits container platforms (single binary, small deps), and how we ran a large timeseries pipeline on Mesos then Kubernetes.

Agenda from the deck

What distributed schedulers do
Why Go for container ecosystems
Best practices and anti-patterns
Walkthrough of Vulcan’s requirements and Mesos → Nomad → Kubernetes path
gRPC in the final architecture

Also on Engineers.SG.

Distributed Scheduler Hell

Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

SREcon17 Asia (USENIX)

Same scheduler war stories framed for an SRE audience: reliability under partition, operational complexity of Mesos/Marathon/Kafka/Cassandra, and the migration toward Kubernetes.

Program entry — public video not confirmed; see the microXchg / GopherCon SG recordings for the closest full captures.

Distributed Timeseries Database in Go

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon India 2017

Deep dive into Vulcan, DigitalOcean’s Prometheus-compatible distributed timeseries database written in Go.

Outline (from the deck)

Why Go for NoSQL/NewSQL (Prometheus, Cockroach, Influx, etcd…)
Timeseries properties: write-heavy, compressible, lossy-friendly
From hash-sharded Prometheus to a pipelined microservice architecture
Kafka ingestion, Cassandra/chunk storage, schema evolution (V1 series → V2 chunks + index)
In-memory query engine and downsampling
Hard numbers we designed for: multi-Gbit/s, 100k writes/s, tens of TB

Distributed Scheduler Hell

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

microXchg 2017 · Berlin

A practical tour of distributed container schedulers drawn from running DigitalOcean’s monitoring stack at scale.

What the talk covers

What a distributed scheduler actually provides vs the Linux kernel (deploy, quotas, networking, scaling)
Vulcan — DigitalOcean’s Prometheus-compatible timeseries system — as a real workload: ~3 Gbit/s network, 100k writes/s, sub-100ms reads, tens of TB storage
Deploying that workload on Mesos + Marathon, custom Kafka schedulers, Cassandra pinning
Failure modes (network partitions) and a counter-example with Nomad
Moving to Kubernetes, internal deploy tooling (Docc / kube-diff style workflows), Flannel load balancing, metrics and logging

Takeaways

How to choose an abstraction for middle-size apps growing into large multi-service fleets — and when not to reach for a full scheduler.

Intro to Microservices (Python)

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Bangkok Python Meetup

Same microservices curriculum as the Go talks, for a Python audience: monolith vs services, RPC vs bus, Docker, and when the complexity is worth it.

Cloud in your Cloud

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Golang UK Conference 2016 · London

How DigitalOcean uses Go to build cloud infrastructure — control plane microservices, scale, and operational reality.

Slides on SlideShare.

HashiConf

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

HashiConf

DigitalOcean-era conference talk adjacent to Nomad, Consul, and container scheduling — the same problem space as Distributed Scheduler Hell.

Velocity NYC 2016

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Velocity NYC 2016

O’Reilly Velocity conference — reliability and operations topics from the DigitalOcean era (related themes to Chaos Monkey on my Laptop).

Scaling to a Million Machines with Prometheus

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

PromCon 2016 · Berlin

How DigitalOcean ran a public-facing monitoring platform on Prometheus toward multi-datacenter, high-cardinality load.

Themes

Prometheus as the customer-facing metrics plane
Sharding, storage pressure, and operational reality past a few thousand machines
Lessons that fed later work on Vulcan (compatible timeseries pipeline)

DigitalOcean Microservices

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Rocket Internet Conf 2016 · Berlin

DigitalOcean microservices practices for a product/engineering audience — how cloud control planes are factored and operated. SlideShare: DigitalOcean Microservices Talk Rocket Internet Conf ‘16.

Slides on SlideShare.

O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference NYC

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference · New York 2016

Conference session from the DigitalOcean period on microservices and cloud architecture.

Cloud in your Cloud — DigitalOcean

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon India 2016

Go-centric cut of Cloud in your Cloud — building DigitalOcean’s platform with Go microservices, multi-DC operations, and production war stories.

Slides on SlideShare.

GopherCon Dubai 2016

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon Dubai 2016

Conference talk for the Dubai Go community — DigitalOcean-era systems and Go topics.

Cloud in your Cloud — how we build DigitalOcean

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

microXchg 2016 · Berlin

How DigitalOcean builds the cloud: Go microservices across many datacenters, tens of thousands of customers, and the day-to-day of writing, monitoring, and shipping control-plane services.

Themes

Microservices that are the cloud product
Observability and deploy culture
Scaling org + codebase past a single monolith (DO’s early Perl stack → dozens of services)

Same core talk also given at GopherCon India and Golang UK 2016.

Game Programming for Education in JavaScript

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

JSConf.Asia 2015 · Singapore

Using game programming for education — including Thai typing / serious games work — and what works when teaching through play in the browser.

Related deck: Serious Gaming, Thai Typing Game (Speaker Deck).

Chaos Monkey on my Laptop

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

GothamGo 2015 · New York

Chaos engineering for apps that cannot tolerate silent netsplits — from Thomson Reuters Eikon Messenger experience.

Story

Netflix Chaos Monkey randomly kills production processes; we needed the same before production
Spin up multi-VM / Docker topologies on a developer laptop
Script NIC failures, host churn, latency between replicas (MySQL/Redis)
Push the same suite into Jenkins and cloud VMs even when prod is bare metal
Cut release-cycle risk by making ops confidence automatic

Audience takeaways

Bulletproof middleware and microservices with integration tests that actually model datacenter failure.

How to keep Wall Street chatting using Go

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

GopherCon India 2015

Reliability and scale for financial instant messaging (Thomson Reuters Eikon Messenger territory): hundreds of thousands of demanding users, multi-datacenter messaging, and why Go fit the problem.

Companion slides historically on SlideShare: Making Wallstreet talk with GO.

Intro to Go

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Bangkok Launchpad 2014

Early Intro to Go for the Bangkok community. Slides historically on SlideShare (Intro to GO — Bangkok Launchpad 2014).

Slides on SlideShare.

Handling Blocking IO in Go

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published on kanwisher.com, July 19, 2012. Restored from the Wayback Machine.

One of the most frustrating things when you start with Go is that fact that IO is blocking. So for example today I needed to spawn a process and read the stdout — easy right?

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Matthew Campbell (@kanwisher), an American engineer based in Bangkok.

I build things at the intersection of distributed systems, Go, and increasingly hardware reverse engineering and open robotics. I’m founder of TensorFleet, working on open software for drone fleets.

Background

TensorFleet — open robotics / drone software (current)
Loom Network / CryptoZombies — Techstars alumni; scaled blockchain education and sidechain tooling
DigitalOcean — microservices, Prometheus-scale monitoring, distributed timeseries (Vulcan)
Earlier: Thomson Reuters (Eikon Messenger), Bloomberg, Gucci, Cartoon Network
Founded Errplane and Langfight

I’ve spoken at 20+ international conferences across Go, DevOps, microservices, and blockchain. Talk videos and abstracts live under Talks.

Open Source

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Speaking

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew Campbell (@kanwisher) — 20+ international conferences including GopherCon, PromCon, microXchg, GothamGo, JSConf.Asia, and Devcon.

This page is a short speaker reel: talks with video first. Click any thumbnail to watch. Full abstracts, slides, and notes live on each talk page.

Work

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

TensorFleet (current)

Open software for robotics and drone fleets — making proprietary hardware usable with open tooling, simulators, and developer experience.

Site: tensorfleet.net

Loom Network / CryptoZombies

Founder (Techstars Winter ‘18). CryptoZombies became one of the most popular interactive blockchain tutorials. Loom built application-specific sidechains and developer tooling for Ethereum-scale dApps.

Home on Matthew Campbell — Hyperworks

Taking apart the G'AIM'E light gun — both halves of it

Akihabara cart reader → macOS + Android: dump SNES ROMs without swapping the SD card

Hello hyperworks.nu

Stack

How to fail at retirement

Will the Machines take over?

WebAssembly is the future of .NET — Avalonia

Deck themes

How I got crabs with Python

Takeaways from the deck

Interview: Loom Network CEO

Practical Plasma: Gaming

Practical Plasma: Gaming

From the deck

Blockchain Apps in Go

Topics

Build your own distributed database

Deck outline

Sponsor lightning talk: Loom Network

Intro to Blockchain Development

Intro to Microservices

From speaker notes

Distributed Scheduler Hell

Agenda from the deck

Distributed Scheduler Hell

Distributed Timeseries Database in Go

Outline (from the deck)

Links

Distributed Scheduler Hell

What the talk covers

Takeaways

Intro to Microservices (Python)

Cloud in your Cloud

HashiConf

Velocity NYC 2016

Scaling to a Million Machines with Prometheus

Themes

Links

DigitalOcean Microservices

O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference NYC

Cloud in your Cloud — DigitalOcean

GopherCon Dubai 2016

Cloud in your Cloud — how we build DigitalOcean

Themes

Game Programming for Education in JavaScript

Chaos Monkey on my Laptop

Story

Audience takeaways

How to keep Wall Street chatting using Go

Intro to Go

Handling Blocking IO in Go

About

Background

Open Source

Speaking

Work

TensorFleet (current)

Loom Network / CryptoZombies